Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, dated October 1995, contains the proceedings of a conference on ethnic conflict held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored it. Academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials presented papers on ethnic and territorial conflict in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. They also discussed what these conflicts mean for US policy. The document contains no UFO material.
“Nevers”25 pages
C00123268 Summary of Discussion QUESTION: When there was a bipolar world, it was fairly easy to identify the strategic interests of the United States and the Soviet Union. How would the General Discussion United States feel in regard to Russia resolving ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union. QUESTION: In your studies of conflict resolution, can you give us some examples of effective outside DR. GUNDE1BEN: We view the issue of conflict and intervention into situations of aggressive ethnic peacekeeping in the former Soviet Union from the nationalism. The only good example I can think of is outlook of preventive diplomacy. We do not want to the tremendous commitment that was necessary to see a reenactment of the old view that there is a sphere stop Nazi Germany, an aggressive ethnic nationalistic of influence of Russia over the Soviet Union. As long state. These kinds of examples are important as we as Russia's involvement in its former periphery is think about getting into the situation in Bosnia. mandated by an international body-be it the UN or the Conference on Security and Cooperation in DR. HINKLE: My field is microstates, and I can tell Europe-and as long as certain rules are followed and you it worked pretty well in Grenada. But I take your the interests of all the parties are taken into account, point. That is why I think that the emphasis really we are not, in principal, opposed to Russian involve- should be on prevention, not intervention. That way, ment. you can act more effectively at lower cost and not be in the position where you are dealing with interven- We also want to contain any ethnic difficulties before tion. they spill over. In Tajikistan, more people are being killed every day than in Bosnia. We do not hear about Imagine if Saddam Husayn had actually succeeded. it because CNN is not there, but certainly there are Twenty years from now, he would have effective con- Iranian, Chinese, Turkish, and Russian interests in trol of 45 percent of the world's oil reserves and Tajikistan, so we cannot ignore the situation there. I would be industriously working to build nuclear think we should be a little more involved in preventive weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. If we diplomacy there. We have limited funds, however, so had the foresight in 1958 to act to facilitate a demo- it is difficult going between ends and means. cratic transition in Iraq, however, we would not have needed the level of resources we used in Desert Storm, and the world might be a happier place. Even in Grenada, if we just had the foresight to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars to preempt the revolution of 1979, we would have saved 108 American casualties in 1983. 186
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.